Kuta, especially the lodges and shops around Kuta Beach, is the Balinese setting where the narrator and Muriel’s holiday fantasy of an expatriate life begins to become a practical plan. Its importance lies in the contrast between the freedom they imagine there and the class boundaries, jealousy, and failed venture that accompany their attempt to remain.

Setting and social world

During their visits to Bali, the narrator and Muriel were less drawn to local celebrations, traditional music, and ancestral rites than to the Westerners living around Kuta Beach and Legian. Their chosen scene was made up of surfing, psychedelic mushrooms, and torch-lit parties by the waterfront. Kuta thus appears not as an account of Balinese society as a whole, but as the setting for a particular expatriate enclave and the visitors’ desire to join it.

A hierarchy of expatriates

The narrator divides this beach society into distinct ranks. Passing tourists with cameras are barely visible to him; backpackers are preoccupied with avoiding rip-offs and paying the real price; Australian surfers seem uncomplicated, drinking beer and listening to hard rock. Above them stand the chic babas, the group he and Muriel aspire to enter. They arrive from Goa, rent wooden beach houses for the season, and later leave for Formentera. Their linen and silk clothes, better-quality marijuana, yoga, and unhurried manner distinguish them from the other visitors.

The apparent ease of the chic babas rests on money whose sources they do not readily disclose. The narrator associates the most audacious members with drug trafficking, which could bring life imprisonment under appalling conditions or even hanging; others deal in precious stones, furniture, or fabric. Kuta’s social glamour therefore carries an economic underside, even as the narrator and Muriel initially experience it as an invitation to an enviable way of life.

Muriel, aspiration, and the bikini venture

Muriel’s beauty and kindness win her acceptance into the chic-baba milieu, while the narrator believes he could not enter it without her. His response is jealousy disguised as disdain: he envies the access he pretends to scorn, and recognizes this as the point when their relationship begins to sour. Yet repeated visits deepen their reluctance to return to Paris, resume their studies, or find work. The narrator imagines writing on a seaside terrace in a bamboo house, sarong-clad, while Muriel goes swimming; the scene gives their desire a concrete, domestic shape.

They then look for a way to finance that life. In Kuta’s shops they find bikinis sewn with golden thread. After questioning several manufacturers, they estimate a purchase price of one dollar apiece and, on Muriel’s calculation, a Paris selling price ten times higher. They invest all their money, along with the allowance due to Peace Corps workers at the end of their service, and order five thousand suits. The plan depends on sending the shipment to France at the French Foreign Ministry’s expense, using the proceeds to support a life divided between Paris and Bali, especially Bali.

The failed return

By the time the manufacturer delivers the boxes, Muriel has been gone for a month, having left the narrator for an older, more self-assured baba. The bikinis that were meant to finance their shared escape instead become the material remainder of a relationship already broken. The narrator returns alone to Paris with the shipment and the manuscript of his first novel, which was inspired by their experiences with magic mushrooms. Kuta’s promise of a lasting alternative to ordinary life consequently ends in separation and an unsuccessful scheme to carry the beach economy back to France.